Stories of my mother, the mystery

WITH Stories We Tell, Canadian actor and filmmaker Sarah Polley serves up a unique, dynamically rendered documentary with a difference.

Stories of my mother, the mystery

WITH Stories We Tell, Canadian actor and filmmaker Sarah Polley serves up a unique, dynamically rendered documentary with a difference.

On the surface, Polley's motives for this project seem very straightforward.

She never really got to know her late mother, Diane, who died of cancer in her early 40s.

At the outset of production, Polley said she believed that capturing the definitive life story of Diane might help her make sense of a grieving process she was far too young to understand at the time.

However, the key to what this very personal project would ultimately become is hinted at in the plurality of the film's title.

Polley invited a vast array of family and friends to relate Diane's biography as they remember it.

The disparities between the recollections of each interviewee become quite pronounced at varying stages in the film, and Polley bravely examines all of them.

Sometimes she pays a heavy emotional cost for doing so. At other times, those involved are forced to confront (and perhaps, forever change) their own interpretation of the ever-mysterious Diane.

The doco is narrated by Michael, Diane's second husband, an intriguing and solitary presence who could have been a worthy subject of a similar film himself.

He is a man who has only recently learned there was so much about his late wife he never knew at all.

The wounds sustained by hearing some of these time-delayed home truths are still very fresh for Michael.

For him to not only anchor the film as its voice but also lay bare his innermost thoughts as its conscience turns out to be a brave and remarkable act.

For other participants, Polley's project is anything but a therapeutic exercise.

To the filmmaker's credit, she does not leave out any on-camera criticism of her work.

In fact, Polley's own misgivings about Stories We Tell are very much to the fore throughout the film, often becoming a sharp commentary on the ability of documentaries to adequately convey the truth.

Be sure to see this moving, funny and engrossing film with as little advance knowledge as possible, and one of the most lasting experiences of the year awaits.

> STORIES WE TELL [M]

Director: Sarah Polley (Away From Her)

Starring: Michael Polley, Sarah Polley, Mark Polley, Rebecca Jenkins

"Separating the facts from the friction"

Rating: 4.5/5